Commvault has shuffled its leadership team and struck a new partnership with private cloud supplier Platform9.
Alan Atkinson was hired as Commvault’s Chief Partner Officer in September 2022. He had previously been SVP, Commercial Sales CTO at Dell with a 2.5-year break before joining Commvault. In the nearly three years since then, Commvault has signed partnership deals with many other companies. There was a cyber-resilience partnership with nine other vendors in late 2023, including Darktrace and Palo Alto. Arrow ECS, HPE, and CrowdStrike deals followed in 2024, and there was an alliance with Deloitte in May this year as well as partnerships with Microsoft and Dell. Atkinson has now been promoted to Chief Business Development Officer, which involves building strategic next-gen technology and security partnerships, driving co-development initiatives, and creating new go-to-market opportunities.
Atkinson said: “Cyber-resilience is a shared challenge, and no single vendor can solve it alone. My new role will focus on extending Commvault’s capabilities across a broader partner ecosystem. I’ll also focus on creating new co-development opportunities that deliver exceptional value to customers and partners alike.”
Commvault’s business development organization is headed up by Chief Trust Officer (CTrO) Danielle Sheer, who reports to the CEO. She serves a role similar to that of a Chief Legal Officer, with responsibilities extending into initiatives that build and maintain trust with customers and employees, championing data privacy, compliance, and cyber-resilience.
Michelle Graff has been hired as Atkinson’s effective replacement, becoming SVP of Global Partners and Channel, overseeing partner sales, resellers and alliances, and the vision and execution of Commvault’s partner programs. She was previously VP Global Channel Sales and Alliances at data security company Securiti.ai, with prior stints at HashiCorp, Pure Storage, and Palo Alto Networks.
Graff reports to Chief Commercial Officer Gary Merrill, previously Commvault’s CFO, who leads the global sales and partner teams.
Platform9, which supplies a VMware migration-focused private cloud, has integrated Commvault’s protection for virtual machines and Kubernetes workloads into its Private Cloud Director offering. Its features include:
- Agentless Virtual Machine backup and recovery
- Application-consistent backups
- Granular file and folder recovery within VMs
- VM disaster recovery to Private Cloud Director clusters in different physical locations
- Protection of Kubernetes-orchestrated containers
This partnership was developed when Atkinson was in his Chief Partner Officer role. He said: ”Combined with Commvault’s critical data protection, disaster recovery and security capabilities, this integration enables joint customers to confidently migrate to Platform9’s Private Cloud Director and know they are protected, and their data is safe.”
Commvault’s competitors, such as Rubrik and Cohesity, are also strongly involved in partnerships. See Rubrik and NTT, and Cohesity and Mandiant. Co-development typically represents a deeper level of collaboration than simple cross-selling.
We expect Atkinson will be operating in the data protection, cyber-resilience, SaaS, hybrid cloud, and AI areas. It’s possible he will also be looking at the use of Commvault-stored backup data in its customer’s LLM and agent operations with RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) using that backup data.
